A talky theatrical piece made for Swedish TV, that
is
stage-bound.
This minor Ingmar Bergman ("Winter Light"/"Fanny and
Alexander"/"Saraband")
work pretends to have something vital to say about the
touchy
relationships
between the sexes, but mainly rehashes all the
director's previous
familiar
arguments about the exasperation of love. What it
turns out to be is
the
director's mea culpa for choosing his art over his
family life, as he
looks
back on the suffering he has caused those women around
him and how he
might
have mistreated his actors. The semi-autobiographical
film was promoted
as Bergman's farewell to cinema. In this one, a
self-conscious Bergman
through actor Erland Josephson, wonders aloud if the
sacrifice was
worth
it. It's a blatant philosophical tract that never
quite works as drama,
but has some mild interest for being so revealing,
personal and modern
in its outlook.

Stage director Henrik Volger (Erland Josephson) is
the
aging and
weary alter ego Bergman figure putting on Strindberg's
Dream Play (his
fifth production of ''The Dream Play'') when after the
rehearsal he's
visited
while sitting on a sofa of the stage set by one of his
young stars,
Anna
Egerman (Lena Olin), an attractive actress whom he has
surprisingly
cast
in the play as a lead. She is looking for her lost
bracelet, but stays
to chat with the director.

Later on the two will be briefly joined by Anna's
mother,
Rakel (Ingrid
Thulin); she's an alcoholic has-been actress who once
was Henrik's
lover.
The unreliable once star actress is given a
humiliating small bit part
as merely a favor from the past, and doesn't take too
kindly to such
poor
treatment and tells us that she's 46 and wants to
again have an affair
with the director. She will exit the stage set after
bitterly attacking
him for abandoning her.

The heart of the film has Henrik imagining what it
would be
like
to have an affair with Anna, who reveals she has a
crush on him. It
leads
to them acting out on the empty stage set a long
sustained love scene
together.

It runs its hands over the human condition like a
meta-physician checking
for imagined bumps and bruises, as if it were a
Strindberg play
reworked
to fit Bergman's agenda. Since everything is so fuzzy,
the entire film
has the possibility of being only Henrik's dream. But
either way, it
still
leaves you with the same thoughts ticking inside the
five times married
director's inner being.